A Mobile Learning Approach to Promoting Students' Learning Performances in The Era of The Pandemic

Educators have indicated the need to foster students' ability to solve problems by acquiring up-to-date knowledge as well as promoting their competencies for making decisions from diverse perspectives based on the acquired knowledge. Traditional courses mainly use lecture-based instruction without providing sufficient opportunities for students to practice and interact with the teacher; therefore, it is difficult to deliver such up-to-date knowledge via traditional instruction, not to mention fostering students' critical thinking. In this study, a Mobile technology model is proposed to address this problem. Moreover, a learning system is developed based on the proposed approach. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a quasi-experiment was conducted in a university with a two-group pre-test post-test design to assess participants' learning achievement and critical thinking. The participants were two classes of undergraduate students. One class with 37 students was the experimental group learning with the Mobile technology learning approach, while the other class with 37 students was the control group learning with the conventional technology-based learning (CTL) approach. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was performed to evaluate the effect of the intervention on the target outcomes. It was found that the experimental group showed better learning achievement and critical thinking than the control group. This implies that the Mobile technology approach has good potential in helping learners think from diverse perspectives and promoting their learning performance and engagement, which is important in higher education aimed at fostering students' competence in acquiring up-to-date knowledge for solving problems.